Kiplinger has been publishing business forecasts and personal finance advice in print and online for over 100 years. Their Personal Finance magazine is a monthly publication providing support, updates and guides for those looking to grow their personal wealth – but in recent years, they’d noticed a decline in subscriptions.

Within Facebook, their chosen social channel, they had begun seeing increasingly high Cost per Acquisitions (CPAs) with their current creative assets and turned to RocketMill for a new creative direction to improve performance. Using their tagline ‘Stay Right on the Money’, a theme that represents Kiplinger’s accurate, trustworthy and concise analysis, we designed three different concepts with the ultimate aim of increasing subscriptions.

To achieve this goal, we needed to ensure our new assets hit three key areas:

• They needed to appeal to both a new (younger) and lapsed (older) audience without alienating each group.
• They needed to clearly communicate how Kiplinger’s publications would help these audiences make the right/wisest financial and investment decisions to elevate their life.
• Finally, the creative executions needed to flex across different platforms (YouTube and Display).

With data at our core, and to prevent wasted media spend, we opted to run a test across all three executions to gain insight into the right concept for launch.

We ran an A/B split test to see how each concept performed when shown to the client’s target market with a separate ad group for each, using the carousel ad format to ensure the placements were the same. To find our winner, we ran the test under a high volume interest audience to get as much data through each concept as possible. This audience allowed us to show ads to younger people with an interest in finance.

Concept Three performed strongest with CPA 67% lower than both the other concepts whilst spending a similar amount. We also saw 64% higher Click Through Rates (CTR) and 51% lower average Cost Per Clicks (CPC) compared to the other two concepts.

With concept three the clear frontrunner with a significantly lower CPC,  we created the full suite of assets, including both video and static.  For the launch, we created a new consolidated structure with all audiences split by ad set in one campaign. 

The ad sets were then split down by audience type (Remarketing, Lookalikes, Interests) allowing Facebook to share the data from each ad set to help find conversions.

The first 30 days after launch showed incredible improvement when compared to the previous six months. We saw a 67% increase in subscriptions within the platform as well as a 61% increase in clicks despite only spending 8% more. Overall , CPC reduced by 33%.

Finally, we saw the CPA reduce significantly since the new assets launched, reducing by 36% in platform.

By running the three concepts as an experiment, we had data behind the decision to go with creative concept three, rather than simply basing this decision on our personal preference. As a result of this campaign and the reduced CPA, Kiplinger has increased their investment into Facebook to drive growth.